Getting a better sense of community - gallery based groups

[Máirín Duffy]

Hi folks,

So one of the things we've discussed every now and then is having some 
kind of gallery system set up (beyond the wiki which isn't quite 
equipped for this) where we can share our work and comment on it, where 
the community can easily browse and comment on it, and (nice bonus) even 
have an RSS feed of artwork the general community can benefit from.

Tonight I started investigating some options we have towards this. A 
great solution would be to have an install of the art.gnome.org software 
or have something custom-built for us, but I don't think we have the 
resources for something like that right now. So I've looked around at 
some other options:

1) Have an art-specific Fedora planet feed -

It would be something like http://art.planet.fedoraproject.org and it 
would be a feed for artwork, not general blog posts. (E.g. you could 
syndicate your deviant art portfolio feed or a flickr fedora art album 
feed to this.)

Whichever other option we go with, it should produce suitable RSS feeds 
so we should probably do this anyway. Send me your feeds (art, not blog) 
and I'll make the request to set it up.

2) Set up a Deviant art community -

So I set one up and played around with it, take a look:

http://fedora-art.deviantart.com/

The advantages of deviant-art:
- is that it is completely tailored for illustrations/designs, not just 
photos.
- it's free, and you can easily attach your source SVGs (or any other 
type of source files) for your work directly to each piece.
- pretty much everything is available as an RSS feed
- nice commenting system for individual pieces
- no upload/usage limits
- licensing on images is explicit - when you create a piece of artwork 
you determine the license explicitly

Disadvantages:
- the RSS feeds don't actually embed the image, they only provide a 
link. (does anyone know if it embeds the image for paid subscription 
accounts? I'd be willing to donate the $$ if so.)
- having a group appears to be kind of a hack. you actually create a 
user that serves as the group, add your group members as friends (who 
also add the group as followers), and one or a small group of people 
have to manually upload things to the gallery. (this can be a good thing 
though, we can use the favorites system to highlight any fedora work, 
including drafts, and only add final/polished work to the gallery.)

3) Flickr community

I gave this a try too, take a look:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/fedora-art/

Advantages:
- free to get an account
- it doesn't require manual intervention to get graphics in the gallery. 
any group members can push their images to the group pool. (and if 
inappropriate/whatever stuff gets pushed the admin can remove it)
- you can create invite-only groups or make them completely open.
- licensing on images is explicit - when you create a piece of artwork 
you determine the license explicitly
- the RSS feeds do actually embed the image, and include any descriptive 
text you added to the image so even though you can't upload your source 
here, you can add a link to it in the description and it'll be published 
to the feed.
- tagging system makes it easier to browse all the pictures
- the UI is pretty nice :)
- the RSS feeds are also awesome in that I think they can be per tag as 
well as for the entire pool of images
- having a group isn't a hack, it's definitely built for that

Disadvantages:
- theres a limit per month on how much you can upload per user account 
(I think it's 50mb/month.)
- flickr is focused entirely towards photos. while i read their terms of 
service and made sure that it was okay for us to use for our purposes - 
people won't be able to search for our artwork using the UI because it 
seems they block non-photos from that according to their policy.

4) Set up a version control repository -

Advantages:
- we can track versions of artwork and its sources
- would ultimately be controlled by the fedora project, not a 
third-party so more reliable

Disadvantages:
- likely will be difficult for folks to browse on, not possible to 
comment on really
- high technical barrier to entry

5) Something else?

I looked briefly at shadowness.com, which is pretty similar to 
deviantart but they have explicit groups *and* their RSS feeds embed 
images. However, their copyright policies are pretty weird. I've also 
never heard of it before (have any of you?) Not sure how 
reliable/trustworthy it is? Flickr and deviantart have both been around 
a while.

Any others we should look at?

Any preferences / comments / ideas?

~m